Don’t just make the text bigger: thoughts on accessibility
I started working as an RNIB Technology Support Volunteer half a year ago. My role involves visiting people with visual impairment to help them with using assistive technology, such as VoiceOver on the iPhone, or sometimes to help resolve general computer-related issues for them. At the same time, as a professional product manager, I also have to consider accessibility at work. In this article, I want to briefly reflect on my direct, albeit limited, experience of working with people with visual impairment, and relate that to our responsibility as product teams to not exclude users with disabilities.
The problem of discoverability
Accessibility design often puts a lot of emphasis on:
- easy-to-read text — font sizing, text colour contrast
- ease of navigation — tabbing navigation
- screen-readers’ ability to read out the contents — image alt text, semantic HTML markup, ARIA roles, iOS Accessibility Traits
All these accessibility features already provide a much improved experience for users with visual impairment. However, I am acutely aware of the fact that most web and mobile apps depend hugely on users being able to explore the interface to discover how to carry out a certain task. As an app grows, the product team has a tendency to try and squeeze more and more use cases into a rectangular space, often allowing users to conveniently jump from one flow and another flow. Strong visual hierarchy then becomes crucial in aiding users to scan the screen and to understand where to focus their attention on in order to fulfil a task. However, when a user cannot clear see what is on the screen, the cognitive load on the users can be overwhelming.
A different approach
During one of my recent RNIB home visits, I had the opportunity to help someone learn a tool called Dolphin Guide. The design of this tool, running on Windows, focuses very much on hiding the complexity of the usual computer screen, and breaking down a typical workflow into a list of options. See screenshot below:
I must admit, as a person without visual impairment, my first impression was slightly underwhelming. However, it soon became apparent how useful this tool was, as the person I was helping managed to navigate the screen and send out an email with very little additional guidance from myself. She had previously struggled with sending emails on her iPhone with VoiceOver, and she was immediately over the moon.
So why did it work? Without doing a deep review of the tool itself, I would boil it down to:
Succinct and unambiguous options
You only have to try using VoiceOver, or other screen-reading tools, on a standard everyday app to understand how frustrating it must be for a person who cannot see the screen to understand what is going on, what the actions are, and how they relate to each other. Microcopy is extremely important in interface design — here is an excellent article by my colleague on microcopy — and Dolphin Guide seems to have struck a good balance between being succinct and being explicit, focusing on what the user is trying to get done.
Predictable screen navigation
The biggest frustration for a person with visual impairment is having to remember how to navigate between screens. Without being able to rely on visual hints, they tend to cope better with a screen flow where each screen only does one thing, and there is one standard way to back out to select another option for a different task. As an example, it is standard for a email interface to allow users to start writing an email while browsing their history of emails. While this may work well for people without visual impairment, it seems that a more restricted flow is easier for a visually-impaired person to understand, as follows:
Select emails option > Options to read emails or write email > Select read emails > Presented with a list of emails > Select an email > Back > Presented with a list of emails > Back > Options to read emails or write email > Select write email
In some ways, mobile devices, with much smaller screens compared with traditional desktop screens, already demand this type of design. So we are already seeing how this benefits even people without visual impairment on a daily basis.
Of course, Dolphin Guide is a very specific piece of software, with limited functionality. It is not a scalable solution to the bigger problem. Users are still going to struggle to access their social networks or their online bank accounts. However, there is something to be learnt from the basic design philosophy behind Dolphin Guide, that can inspire product teams to create usable, conversational user interface for everyone, and not just for people with visual impairment. This is not going to be a straight-forward process, as it really does challenge what most people would accept as good UX.
And, I urge every team, at the very least, to test their products with people with disabilities.
What the future holds
By not always being inclusive, technology has ironically made life difficult for people with visual impairment, as more and more services are automated and moved online.
However, I remain optimistic. Not only do I believe in equal access to technology, I also firmly believe that technology has a particularly important role to play in improving lives of people with disabilities. I have already seen how mobile devices are much friendlier to use than traditional desktops for some users. Voice assistant technologies like Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant are set to bring about a transformative experience for many. Being able to send messages via a voice command is just the beginning. With advances in speech recognition and artificial intelligence, I see that future technologies can provide an intuitive, yet rich, conversational experience for users with visual impairment, enabling them to fulfil their day-to-day needs.
